OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Structural Health Monitoring of Cantilever Beam, a Case Study -- Using Bayesian Neural Network AND Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The advancement of machine learning algorithms has opened a wide scope for vibration-based SHM (Structural Health Monitoring). Vibration-based SHM is based on the fact that damage will alter the dynamic properties viz., structural response, frequencies, mode shapes, etc of the structure. The responses measured using sensors, which are high dimensional in nature, can be intelligently analyzed using machine learning techniques for damage assessment. Neural networks employing multilayer architectures are expressive models capable of capturing complex relationships between input-output pairs but do not account for uncertainty in network outputs. A BNN (Bayesian Neural Network) refers to extending standard networks with posterior inference. It is a neural network with a prior distribution on its weights. Deep learning architectures like CNN (Convolutional neural network) and LSTM(Long Short Term Memory) are good candidates for representation learning from high dimensional data. The advantage of using CNN over multi-layer neural networks is that they are good feature extractors as well as classifiers, which eliminates the need for generating hand-engineered features. LSTM networks are mainly used for sequence modeling. This paper presents both a Bayesian multi-layer perceptron and deep learning-based approach for damage detection and location identification in beam-like structures. Raw frequency response data simulated using finite element analysis is fed as the input of the network. As part of this, frequency response was generated for a series of simulations in the cantilever beam involving different damage scenarios. This case study shows the effectiveness of the above approaches to predict bending rigidity with an acceptable error rate.
What is needed for simple spatial language capabilities in VQA?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Visual question answering (VQA) comprises a variety of language capabilities. The diagnostic benchmark dataset CLEVR has fueled progress by helping to better assess and distinguish models in basic abilities like counting, comparing and spatial reasoning in vitro. Following this approach, we focus on spatial language capabilities and investigate the question: what are the key ingredients to handle simple visual-spatial relations? We look at the SAN, RelNet, FiLM and MC models and evaluate their learning behavior on diagnostic data which is solely focused on spatial relations. Via comparative analysis and targeted model modification we identify what really is required to substantially improve upon the CNN-LSTM baseline.
A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Optimizing Age-of-Information in RF-powered Communication Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we study a real-time monitoring system in which multiple source nodes are responsible for sending update packets to a common destination node in order to maintain the freshness of information at the destination. Since it may not always be feasible to replace or recharge batteries in all source nodes, we consider that the nodes are powered through wireless energy transfer (WET) by the destination. For this system setup, we investigate the optimal online sampling policy (referred to as the age-optimal policy) that jointly optimizes WET and scheduling of update packet transmissions with the objective of minimizing the long-term average weighted sum of Age-of-Information (AoI) values for different physical processes (observed by the source nodes) at the destination node, referred to as the sum-AoI. To solve this optimization problem, we first model this setup as an average cost Markov decision process (MDP). Due to the extreme curse of dimensionality in the state space of the formulated MDP, classical reinforcement learning algorithms are no longer applicable to our problem. Motivated by this, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm that can learn the age-optimal policy in a computationally-efficient manner. We further characterize the structural properties of the age-optimal policy analytically, and demonstrate that it has a threshold-based structure with respect to the AoI values for different processes. We extend our analysis to characterize the structural properties of the policy that maximizes average throughput for our system setup, referred to as the throughput-optimal policy. Afterwards, we analytically demonstrate that the structures of the age-optimal and throughput-optimal policies are different. We also numerically demonstrate these structures as well as the impact of system design parameters on the optimal achievable average weighted sum-AoI.
Long-Duration Fully Autonomous Operation of Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Systems for Remote-Sensing Data Acquisition
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Recent applications of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to precision agriculture have shown increased ease and efficiency in data collection at precise remote locations. However, further enhancement of the field requires operation over long periods of time, e.g. days or weeks. This has so far been impractical due to the limited flight times of such platforms and the requirement of humans in the loop for operation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a fully autonomous rotorcraft UAS that is capable of performing repeated flights for long-term observation missions without any human intervention. We address two key technologies that are critical for such a system: full platform autonomy to enable mission execution independently from human operators and the ability of vision-based precision landing on a recharging station for automated energy replenishment. High-level autonomous decision making is implemented as a hierarchy of master and slave state machines. Vision-based precision landing is enabled by estimating the landing pad's pose using a bundle of AprilTag fiducials configured for detection from a wide range of altitudes. We provide an extensive evaluation of the landing pad pose estimation accuracy as a function of the bundle's geometry. The functionality of the complete system is demonstrated through two indoor experiments with a duration of 11 and 10.6 hours, and one outdoor experiment with a duration of 4 hours. The UAS executed 16, 48 and 22 flights respectively during these experiments. In the outdoor experiment, the ratio between flying to collect data and charging was 1 to 10, which is similar to past work in this domain. All flights were fully autonomous with no human in the loop. To our best knowledge this is the first research publication about the long-term outdoor operation of a quadrotor system with no human interaction.
Towards Understanding of eSports Athletes' Potentialities: The Sensing System for Data Collection and Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

eSports is a developing multidisciplinary research area. At present, there is a lack of relevant data collected from real eSports athletes and lack of platforms which could be used for the data collection and further analysis. In this paper, we present a sensing system for enabling the data collection from professional athletes. Also, we report on the case study about collecting and analyzing the gaze data from Monolith professional eSports team specializing in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) discipline. We perform a comparative study on assessing the gaze of amateur players and professional athletes. The results of our work are vital for ensuring eSports data collection and the following analysis in the scope of scouting or assessing the eSports players and athletes.
Investigating Convolutional Neural Networks using Spatial Orderness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been pivotal to the success of many state-of-the-art classification problems, in a wide variety of domains (for e.g. vision, speech, graphs and medical imaging). A commonality within those domains is the presence of hierarchical, spatially agglomerative local-to-global interactions within the data. For two-dimensional images, such interactions may induce an a priori relationship between the pixel data and the underlying spatial ordering of the pixels. For instance in natural images, neighboring pixels are more likely contain similar values than non-neighboring pixels which are further apart. To that end, we propose a statistical metric called spatial orderness, which quantifies the extent to which the input data (2D) obeys the underlying spatial ordering at various scales. In our experiments, we mainly find that adding convolutional layers to a CNN could be counterproductive for data bereft of spatial order at higher scales. We also observe, quite counter-intuitively, that the spatial orderness of CNN feature maps show a synchronized increase during the intial stages of training, and validation performance only improves after spatial orderness of feature maps start decreasing. Lastly, we present a theoretical analysis (and empirical validation) of the spatial orderness of network weights, where we find that using smaller kernel sizes leads to kernels of greater spatial orderness and vice-versa.
The smallest grammar problem revisited
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

In a seminal paper of Charikar et al. on the smallest grammar problem, the authors derive upper and lower bounds on the approximation ratios for several grammar-based compressors, but in all cases there is a gap between the lower and upper bound. Here the gaps for $\mathsf{LZ78}$ and $\mathsf{BISECTION}$ are closed by showing that the approximation ratio of $\mathsf{LZ78}$ is $Θ( (n/\log n)^{2/3})$, whereas the approximation ratio of $\mathsf{BISECTION}$ is $Θ(\sqrt{n/\log n})$. In addition, the lower bound for $\mathsf{RePair}$ is improved from $Ω(\sqrt{\log n})$ to $Ω(\log n/\log\log n)$. Finally, results of Arpe and Reischuk relating grammar-based compression for arbitrary alphabets and binary alphabets are improved.
Demystifying Learning Rate Policies for High Accuracy Training of Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Learning Rate (LR) is an important hyper-parameter to tune for effective training of deep neural networks (DNNs). Even for the baseline of a constant learning rate, it is non-trivial to choose a good constant value for training a DNN. Dynamic learning rates involve multi-step tuning of LR values at various stages of the training process and offer high accuracy and fast convergence. However, they are much harder to tune. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of 13 learning rate functions and their associated LR policies by examining their range parameters, step parameters, and value update parameters. We propose a set of metrics for evaluating and selecting LR policies, including the classification confidence, variance, cost, and robustness, and implement them in LRBench, an LR benchmarking system. LRBench can assist end-users and DNN developers to select good LR policies and avoid bad LR policies for training their DNNs. We tested LRBench on Caffe, an open source deep learning framework, to showcase the tuning optimization of LR policies. Evaluated through extensive experiments, we attempt to demystify the tuning of LR policies by identifying good LR policies with effective LR value ranges and step sizes for LR update schedules.
Scalable Explanation of Inferences on Large Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Probabilistic inferences distill knowledge from graphs to aid human make important decisions. Due to the inherent uncertainty in the model and the complexity of the knowledge, it is desirable to help the end-users understand the inference outcomes. Different from deep or high-dimensional parametric models, the lack of interpretability in graphical models is due to the cyclic and long-range dependencies and the byzantine inference procedures. Prior works did not tackle cycles and make \textit{the} inferences interpretable. To close the gap, we formulate the problem of explaining probabilistic inferences as a constrained cross-entropy minimization problem to find simple subgraphs that faithfully approximate the inferences to be explained. We prove that the optimization is NP-hard, while the objective is not monotonic and submodular to guarantee efficient greedy approximation. We propose a general beam search algorithm to find simple trees to enhance the interpretability and diversity in the explanations, with parallelization and a pruning strategy to allow efficient search on large and dense graphs without hurting faithfulness. We demonstrate superior performance on 10 networks from 4 distinct applications, comparing favorably to other explanation methods. Regarding the usability of the explanation, we visualize the explanation in an interface that allows the end-users to explore the diverse search results and find more personalized and sensible explanations.
System Evaluation of the Intel Optane Byte-addressable NVM
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Byte-addressable non-volatile memory (NVM) features high density, DRAM comparable performance, and persistence. These characteristics position NVM as a promising new tier in the memory hierarchy. Nevertheless, NVM has asymmetric read and write performance, and considerably higher write energy than DRAM. Our work provides an in-depth evaluation of the first commercially available byte-addressable NVM -- the Intel Optane DC persistent memory. The first part of our study quantifies the latency, bandwidth, power efficiency, and energy consumption under eight memory configurations. We also evaluate the real impact on in-memory graph processing workloads. Our results show that augmenting NVM with DRAM is essential, and the combination can effectively bridge the performance gap and provide reasonable performance with higher capacity. We also identify NUMA-related performance characteristics for accesses to memory on a remote socket. In the second part, we employ two fine-grained allocation policies to control traffic distribution between DRAM and NVM. Our results show that bandwidth spilling between DRAM and NVM could provide 2.0x bandwidth and enable $20\%$ larger problems than using DRAM as a cache. Also, write isolation between DRAM and NVM could save up to 3.9x energy and improves bandwidth by 3.1x compared to DRAM-cached NVM. We establish a roofline model to explore power and energy efficiency at various distributions of read-only traffic. Our results show that NVM requires 1.8x lower power than DRAM for data-intensive workloads. Overall, applications can significantly optimize performance and power efficiency by adapting traffic distribution to NVM and DRAM through memory configurations and fine-grained policies to fully exploit the new memory device.
A New Technique of Camera Calibration: A Geometric Approach Based on Principal Lines
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Camera calibration is a crucial prerequisite in many applications of computer vision. In this paper, a new, geometry-based camera calibration technique is proposed, which resolves two main issues associated with the widely used Zhang's method: (i) the lack of guidelines to avoid outliers in the computation and (ii) the assumption of fixed camera focal length. The proposed approach is based on the closed-form solution of principal lines (PLs), with their intersection being the principal point while each PL can concisely represent relative orientation/position (up to one degree of freedom for both) between a special pair of coordinate systems of image plane and calibration pattern. With such analytically tractable image features, computations associated with the calibration are greatly simplified, while the guidelines in (i) can be established intuitively. Experimental results for synthetic and real data show that the proposed approach does compare favorably with Zhang's method, in terms of correctness, robustness, and flexibility, and addresses issues (i) and (ii) satisfactorily.
LabelECG: A Web-based Tool for Distributed Electrocardiogram Annotation
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

Electrocardiography plays an essential role in diagnosing and screening cardiovascular diseases in daily healthcare. Deep neural networks have shown the potentials to improve the accuracies of arrhythmia detection based on electrocardiograms (ECGs). However, more ECG records with ground truth are needed to promote the development and progression of deep learning techniques in automatic ECG analysis. Here we propose a web-based tool for ECG viewing and annotating, LabelECG. With the facilitation of unified data management, LabelECG is able to distribute large cohorts of ECGs to dozens of technicians and physicians, who can simultaneously make annotations through web-browsers on PCs, tablets and cell phones. Along with the doctors from four hospitals in China, we applied LabelECG to support the annotations of about 15,000 12-lead resting ECG records in three months. These annotated ECGs have successfully supported the First China ECG intelligent Competition. La-belECG will be freely accessible on the Internet to support similar researches, and will also be upgraded through future works.
Recommendation of Exception Handling Code in Mobile App Development
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

In modern programming languages, exception handling is an effective mechanism to avoid unexpected runtime errors. Thus, failing to catch and handle exceptions could lead to serious issues like system crashing, resource leaking, or negative end-user experiences. However, writing correct exception handling code is often challenging in mobile app development due to the fast-changing nature of API libraries for mobile apps and the insufficiency of their documentation and source code examples. Our prior study shows that in practice mobile app developers cause many exception-related bugs and still use bad exception handling practices (e.g. catch an exception and do nothing). To address such problems, in this paper, we introduce two novel techniques for recommending correct exception handling code. One technique, XRank, recommends code to catch an exception likely occurring in a code snippet. The other, XHand, recommends correction code for such an occurring exception. We have developed ExAssist, a code recommendation tool for exception handling using XRank and XHand. The empirical evaluation shows that our techniques are highly effective. For example, XRank has top-1 accuracy of 70% and top-3 accuracy of 87%. XHand's results are 89% and 96%, respectively.
How far should self-driving cars see? Effect of observation range on vehicle self-localization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Accuracy and time efficiency are two essential requirements for the self-localization of autonomous vehicles. While the observation range considered for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has a significant effect on both accuracy and computation time, its effect is not well investigated in the literature. In this paper, we will answer the question: How far should a driverless car observe during self-localization? We introduce a framework to dynamically define the observation range for localization to meet the accuracy requirement for autonomous driving, while keeping the computation time low. To model the effect of scanning range on the localization accuracy for every point on the map, several map factors were employed. The capability of the proposed framework was verified using field data, demonstrating that it is able to improve the average matching time from 142.2 ms to 39.3 ms while keeping the localization accuracy around 8.1 cm.
Transfer Learning-Based Label Proportions Method with Data of Uncertainty
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Learning with label proportions (LLP), which is a learning task that only provides unlabeled data in bags and each bag's label proportion, has widespread successful applications in practice. However, most of the existing LLP methods don't consider the knowledge transfer for uncertain data. This paper presents a transfer learning-based approach for the problem of learning with label proportions(TL-LLP) to transfer knowledge from source task to target task where both the source and target tasks contain uncertain data. Our approach first formulates objective model for the uncertain data and deals with transfer learning at the same time, and then proposes an iterative framework to build an accurate classifier for the target task. Extensive experiments have shown that the proposed TL-LLP method can obtain the better accuracies and is less sensitive to noise compared with the existing LLP methods.
"Computer Science for all": Concepts to engage teenagers and non-CS students in technology
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

Knowledge in Computer Science (CS) is essential, and companies have increased their demands for CS professionals. Despite this, many jobs remain unfilled. Furthermore, employees with computational thinking (CT) skills are required, even if they are not actual technicians. Moreover, the gender disparity in technology related fields is a serious problem. Even if companies want to hire women in technology, the number of women who enter these fields is remarkably low. In high schools, most teenagers acquire only low-level skills in CS. Thus, they may never understand the fundamental concepts of CS, have unrealistic expectations or preconceptions, and are influenced by stereotype-based expectations. Consequently, many teenagers exclude computing as a career path. In this research study, we present two promising concepts to overcome these challenges. First, we consider alternative paths to enter the field of CS. In 2018, a voluntary lecture "Design your own app" at the University of Graz for students of all degree programs was introduced. In total, 202 students participated. We applied a Game Development-Based Learning (GDBL) approach with the visual coding tool Pocket Code, a mobile app developed at Graz University of Technology. The students were supposed to create simple games directly on smartphones. The course received positive evaluations and led to our second concept; In January 2019, we started to design a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) with the title "Get FIT in Computer Science". First, this course can be used to encourage young women who have little to no previous knowledge in CS. Second, it should help all teenagers to get a more realistic picture of CS to its basic concepts. Third, teachers can use the course materials to lead high school classes (Open Educational Resources). Finally, the MOOC can be accessed by everyone interested in this topic.
A unified representation network for segmentation with missing modalities
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Over the last few years machine learning has demonstrated groundbreaking results in many areas of medical image analysis, including segmentation. A key assumption, however, is that the train- and test distributions match. We study a realistic scenario where this assumption is clearly violated, namely segmentation with missing input modalities. We describe two neural network approaches that can handle a variable number of input modalities. The first is modality dropout: a simple but surprisingly effective modification of the training. The second is the unified representation network: a network architecture that maps a variable number of input modalities into a unified representation that can be used for downstream tasks such as segmentation. We demonstrate that modality dropout makes a standard segmentation network reasonably robust to missing modalities, but that the same network works even better if trained on the unified representation.